david (w) on historical materialism and doe
david wengrow on historical materialism and dawn of everything (book)
via simona ferlini tweet [https://x.com/sonmi451it/status/1744721448714084785?s=20]:
a precious and much needed piece, clarifying, for example, why it is so important to remember that THE STATE HAS NO ORIGINS – so essential now that we witness the consequences of the murderous delusion of identifying nations and states
which was quote tweeting this tweet [https://x.com/anthciis/status/1744459042972639611?s=20]:
Get the @davidwengrow article, “On Historical Materialism and The Dawn of Everything,” here: https://osf.io/pcr7d/download
links to article from dec 2023
notes/quotes from 14 pg pdf download:
1
One of the main incentives for David Graeber and me to embark on this project was our sense that much important research on social inequality has become siloed within academic disciplines (economics, political science, philosophy), which have their origins in a time when our own specialisms of archaeology and anthropology barely existed. For their own part, contemporary archaeologists and anthropologists tend to get embroiled in theoretical debates about topics that shift ground on a regular cycle every decade or so, such that little cumulative progress is made on questions of major importance to other disciplines.
same song ness as cancerous distraction
Worse, while archaeology and anthropology themselves were once closely related fields, today they have drifted apart. The result is that specialists rarely talk across these fields, let alone to people in other disciplines, about the implications of their findings, which (we, at least, felt) are increasingly turning much conventional wisdom about the course of human history on its head. We wanted to see what happens when you put them back together again after a long period of mutual estrangement. DOE is the result.
We also noticed the creeping effects of intellectual isolation on debates about topics of urgent public concern. Thus, when someone from outside our fields—say, a biologist, a political scientist, an economist, an evolutionary psychologist, or even an ancient or modern historian— tries to capture the “broad sweep” of the human past to make general statements about the origins of political order, the development of human ethical systems, the future of work and leisure, the economic consequences of warfare and pandemic, or our prospects for a sustainable relationship with the Earth System, they tend to replicate the state of knowledge in our fields as it stood in the 1950s or 60s, or even harking back to natural law theory of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.
all whalespeak ness till we get out of sea world
In the present climate, stepping outside one’s chronological or regional specialism takes a lot of intellectual courage. Leaping headlong into the choppy waters of a completely different discipline might be considered downright reckless. We all have a lot of catching up to do. And inevitably, there will always be colleagues who remind you that everything you are saying about their particular sub-field has already been covered. By contrast, the contributions to this critical exchange invite us to reconsider some of the intellectual problems that lie at the very core of our respective disciplines.
or perhaps a letting go of intellect ness.. intellectness as cancerous distraction we can’t seem to let go of.. there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
Enzo Rossi defends DOE against charges of “idealism” or “anti-materialism” and shows how our arguments (e.g. concerning the “cultural schismogenesis” of foraging societies in California and the Northwest Coast) are, in fact, consistent with Marxist frameworks of analysis. It’s odd, in a way, that such a defense should have been necessary, since we ourselves have explicitly aligned our approach with Karl Marx’s famous (1852 [1974]) opening to The Eighteenth Brumaire (see DOE, p. 206): “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”
history ness and research ness as cancerous distractions
black science of people/whales law et al
2
Our most detailed treatment of that particular case (Wengrow and Graeber, 2018a) appeared some years before DOE in American Anthropologist with commentaries from specialists in the archaeology and cultural anthropology of the region (Field, 2018; Fitzhugh, 2018; Grier, 2018) and *a response by myself and David Graeber (Wengrow and Graeber, 2018b). Rossi’s summary of our arguments there is not completely accurate. We do not make any strong claim that historical differences in uses of the landscape are insignificant for an understanding of social change. Our point is rather that these differences do not account adequately for the presence of hereditary, household slavery in one area and the culturally marked absence of this institution in another, directly neighbouring area.
..we seek to understand how two sharply contrasting systems of labour and value (one based on slavery, the other rejecting it) emerged historically in adjacent parts of North America through changes in the material and ethical basis of domestic life, and also to shed light on how—in the absence of central coordination or overarching systems of government—such initially small-scale differences generated highly distinct social formations, detectable over impressively large regions.
..Once recognised, such processes may also be understood as contributing to long-term trajectories of political development, in ways that have previously been masked by the catch-all designation of “affluent” or “complex” hunter-gatherers as members of a single type of human society, defined largely in negative terms by its lack of agriculture, and its differences from “immediate return” or (in older parlance) “simple” hunter-gatherers. Given the focus of this discussion on questions of historical materialism, it is worth restating in full the conclusions of our American Anthropologist piece:
In broader historical terms, it is still widely assumed that institutional change in preindustrial societies was closely anchored to intensification in methods of food production, especially the adoption and refinement of agriculture. Within this established paradigm, the development of forager societies on the west coast of North America can only be conceptualized as a puzzling anomaly or a truncated experiment in “paleo-political ecology,” real politics being supposedly reserved for agrarian societies and “modern-day elites.” The case of Aboriginal slavery and its rejection on the Pacific coast serves as an important corrective to such views. It reminds us that terms like “emergent” or “incipient,” when applied to forms of inequality, are by their very nature fictions. *Forms of inequality are always equally real for those who live them and thus equally open to challenge and reversal..t There are no evolutionary false starts in this regard, no “archaic peoples,” nor any dormant seedbeds of political change, awaiting the magical hand of agriculture that brings them to fruition. It is these lingering illusions that still prevent us from exploring the pathways that lead from the hunting retinue to the dynastic court, from tribal slavery to tributary states, and from “original affluence” to the modern leisure class. (Wengrow and Graeber, 2018a: 247)
*or rather.. to a legit nother way for 8b people to live.. legit free.. seeing ie: challenge/reversal as cancerous distractions
3
..there is nothing especially “materialist” about measuring rates of inequality across different societies along a single index, as Alden Smith and Codding do. In fact, this kind of approach glosses over questions that would be central to any Marxian analysis of social change, such as the social forms taken by human labour, how value is generated, and the means by which material resources are translated into power over human beings.
Let me dwell a little more on this (increasingly common) kind of procedure. *What exactly is the problem with it? To begin, consider how hierarchy is defined and measured...**Combining them in a single index of hierarchy introduces circularity into the argument and weakens it;
*rather.. that we are defining and measuring anything.. need a means/way (and today have that means) sans any form of m\a\p
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
**any form of m\a\p creates/perpetuates same song
4
What we both found to be of value in such models is their insistence (as Marshall Sahlins once put it to us over lunch, in characteristically pithy terms) that “inequality” is always a relation between societies, never just within them.
5
The broader implications of all this for an analysis of social change were perceptively summarised by David Graeber (2006: 70):
Graeber, D. (2006) Turning modes of production inside out: or, why capitalism is a transformation of slavery. Critique of Anthropology 26 (1): 61-85.
What has passed for ‘materialism’ in traditional Marxism—the division between material ‘infrastructure’ and ideal ‘superstructure’—is itself a perverse form of idealism. Granted, those who practice law, or music, or religion, or finance, or social theory, always do tend to claim that they are dealing with something higher, more abstract, than those who plant onions, blow glass or operate sewing machines. But it’s not really true. The actions involved in the production of law, poetry, etc., are just as material as any others. Once you acknowledge the simple dialectical point that what we take to be self-identical objects are really processes of action, then it becomes pretty obvious that such actions are always (a) motivated by meanings (ideas) and (b) always proceed through a concrete medium (material), and that while all systems of domination seem to propose that ‘No, this is not true, really there is some pure domain of law, or truth, or grace, or theory, or finance capital, that floats above it all’, such claims are, to use an appropriately earthy metaphor, bullshit.
I will now move on to Widerquist and McCall’s request that I clarify what is meant by our claim that things such as inequality and the State have “no origin.” The explanation is in the title of the book (or at least, its English edition, which has proved difficult to render in certain other languages), which reflects our dissatisfaction with endless and largely inconclusive debates about the “dawn” or “origins” of this or that specific institution. These debates assume that the ultimate explanation for any given phenomenon (patriarchy, civilization, warfare, the City, the State, even inequality itself) lies in identifying the precise moment when “it” first came into existence.
*As Karl Popper (1945) showed long ago, the problem with this way of thinking about history or social science is that it transforms its object of study from a category into an essence: that is, from being the product of a particular cultural context (which categories like “civilization,” “complexity,” and “the State” most certainly are) to a status that is almost God-like in its infallibility and transcendence. **Instead of trying to critically untangle what particular combination of material factors and conceptual processes gave rise to such a category in the first place .. The effect is to reify our own categories of thought, rather than subjecting them to critical and historical scrutiny.
*aka: into the assumed/perpetuated sea world
need a means to get out.. hari rat park law et al
**or rather.. let go of all the untangling and explaining truth/falsehood of category ness.. and just go with infinitesimal structures approaching the limit of structureless\ness and/or vice versa .. aka: ginorm/small ness
6
Anthropology—and by extension archaeology—are in some ways distinguished as disciplines by their unwillingness to tell stories that begin by dividing human experience into categories like “economy,” “religion,” “gender” or “politics” (or indeed “materialism” and “idealism”) and to insist, *instead, on trying to find the lived reality of one within the other: the politics of gender, the sanctity of private property, the materiality of religion, and so on. To posit the isolated “dawn” or “origin” of any one such facet of human experience is really to engage in a kind of make-believe or thought experiment, where we pretend temporarily that the **others either don’t exist or are somehow unimportant.
*to me.. still same song if holding onto any of it..
**to me.. they exist/ed.. but in sea world.. so not yeah important.. because they have become cancerous distractions.. need to let go
There is nothing inherently wrong with thought experiments, *but they have to be judged by the usefulness and clarity of their results.
*to me.. that means same song.. any form of m\a\p (ie: judging/rating usefulness; insisting on clarity; insisting on results;..) .. cancerous distractions.. and why we have not yet gotten to legit freedom
*None of this is to say that we can do without categories and classifications altogether. The challenge it is to define them in ways that at least try to escape the most obvious conceptual trap of casting one’s own familiar values and institutions as a timeless standard against which all other human achievements must be measured. **By approaching things differently, could we learn something new?
*then same song.. or.. if you like.. we need daily curiosity (itch-in-the-soul) to be our only label(s)
imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
**rather.. by trying something legit diff.. could we realize ‘learning’ et al might not be the focus of legit free people..
gershenfeld something else law et al
.. *Access to violence, knowledge, and charisma, we propose, define the very possibilities of social domination, and offer a more productive—dare we say, scientific—framework for comparing and contrasting systems of domination.
any form of m\a\p is structural violence.. is spiritual violence.. is domination ness.. any form of people telling other people what to do
7
*The parallel project of investigating a more remote human past is not in any way diminished by this, since for us at least it was never a matter of “digging for utopia” but of freeing us to think about the possibilities of human social arrangements, unhampered by dogmatic interpretations of obsolete theories based on poor data.
*to me.. nothing legit free to date.. so to me.. all non legit data.. (black science of people/whales law)
8
..Recall, here, our second elementary form of domination: *control over knowledge, in this case sacred knowledge deemed central to the reproduction of life, access to which is tightly controlled through rites of initiation.
*intellectness as cancerous distraction we can’t seem to let go of.. there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
to me.. all we need to live free.. is already inside each one of us.. adding anything else is a compromise.. it becomes a form of people telling other people what to do
*Most of the arguments in favour of forager egalitarianism centre on the importance of food-sharing as evidence of equality, and when they acknowledge the existence of hierarchically organized forager societies account for these in terms of ecologically specific possibilities for the control of material resources. While the **relevance of material resources cannot be denied, the assumption that they are the only resources that matter arises from an entrenched view derived from nineteenth-century analyses of social class that material disparities are the only significant ones, so the lack of concern with them on the part of most foragers, combined with the importance of food-sharing, means they must be egalitarian.
*need to try this dance: ‘in undisturbed ecosystems ..the average individual, species, or population, left to its own devices, behaves in ways that serve and stabilize the whole..’ –Dana Meadows
**to me .. that’s why we’re not dancing (legit free).. we have this preconceived/cemented notion of what basic needs are.. until we let go of that and try something legit diff.. same song
ie: need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
9
In addition to proposing three elementary forms of domination (control of violence, control of knowledge, and personal charisma), *DOE also posits three elementary forms of human freedom: to move away, to disobey, and to dismantle and redesign the social worlds we inhabit. As Widerquist and McCall correctly note, this formulation is entirely consistent with Boehm’s analysis of ‘Reverse Dominance Hierarchy’ and his contention that, in social and cognitive terms, the human line became distinct from our closest primate relatives partially by **developing collective strategies to constrain potential bullies and dominators
*graeber and wengrow freedom law
**rather .. need to try gershenfeld something else law
We would not see the exercise of such elementary freedoms as being historically confined to small-scale foraging societies, or indeed, as particularly characteristic of small groups in general. As we note elsewhere, quite the opposite seems more likely to be true: *“the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale—the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude—the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence” (Graeber and Wengrow, 2018).
*steiner care to oppression law.. graeber violence in care law.. et al
10
Marx and Engels developed historical materialism as a radical exploration of the potential for human freedom. Pre-agricultural societies were believed to have lived in a state of “primitive communism”, not consciously created but the necessary outcome of an existence defined by the struggle for material survival (“bare subsistence”). The original division of society into classes thus came as a tragic necessity, which enabled progress in the arts and sciences at the price of a separation between those with the leisure to experiment or create and the masses whose fate was to toil in their service and obey their every whim. But freedoms lost would one day be recuperated through a dialectical process leading (via feudalism and capitalism) towards the birth of collective self-consciousness among a revolutionary proletariat.
Today, the rudiments of this story (generally with the last part removed) are less likely to be told by political radicals than by conservative thinkers, for whom its ultimate lesson is that the original separation of “master” and “servant” must continue indefinitely—until the sun explodes, as David liked to say—and that there really is no alternative. War means peace, freedom means slavery, and that boot of impersonal bureaucracy really will keep stomping on your face, and your children’s faces, forever. It’s important to stress that the seeds of this striking ideological reversal, which we are now witnessing, were sown much earlier, around the middle of the eighteenth century, when Anne-Robert Turgot and the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment first proposed the classification of human societies according to “modes of subsistence” (hunters, shepherds, farmers, commercial civilisation) as a framework for understanding the course of human history.
As we show in chapter 2 of DOE, this framework—upon which historical materialists would later erect their theory of human freedom—began life as something entirely different: as part of a conservative backlash against the “Indigenous critique” of European civilization. And ironically, it is under the guise of a “materialist” approach to human history that this backlash continues right up to the present day. What it insists on is basically this: Indigenous critics such as the seventeenth century Wendat statesman Kandiaronk—or their modern counterparts, say, Ailton Krenak or Davi Kopenawa—may have whatever opinions they like about the state of contemporary civilization. But what they say or think is ultimately of little value, because the “traditional” nature of the societies they come from renders all such perspectives equal insofar as they are all equally irrelevant to the concerns of modern, progressive nations.
and again.. to me.. no one to date has legit data/critique/whatever.. and that if we were legit free.. those things would be irrelevant s .. cancerous distractions .. anyway
In fact, so the argument goes today, just as it did back then, the reason why such people can hold radically creative ideas about the potential for human freedom, participatory democracy, alternatives to capitalism, or a more healthy relationship with the biosphere is not because their thinking is more advanced, but precisely because it comes from a world that is “behind” us in every meaningful sense (“meaningful,” for such self-proclaimed “materialists,” usually boils down to the technological capacity for capturing energy and resources, so of course, the logic of the argument is itself rather circular). Although few these days would dare to say it outright, the prevailing assumption is that Indigenous critics offer us little more than a nostalgic window onto earlier phases or stages of human history, which we may variously choose to admire or despise, but to which there is ultimately no return.
*In political terms, then, perhaps the larger question at stake here is whether historical materialism, as a theory of human liberation, can really hope to retain any force, relevance, or even coherence, while clinging to empirically bankrupt systems..t of social and chronological classification forged in the high tide of European colonialism and commercial expansion with precisely the opposite ends in view. As Robin D. G. Kelley points out to me, this echoes questions first raised by Cederic Robinson (2021[1983]) who argued that genealogies of capitalism **based on universal stages of development (defined by forces of production) have largely ignored the lived reality of capitalist exploitation, which from the beginning was rooted not just in unequal access to land, technology, or other material resources but also in the systemic derivation of social and economic value by certain human beings from the racialized identity of other human beings.
*nothing can/has.. to date.. we need to let go of any form of m\a\p (includes ie: coherence – quality of being logical/consistent).. graeber unpredictability/surprise law.. graeber can’t know law.. et al
**all/both.. same song
11
With this in mind, it becomes critical to understand the specific nature of cultural schismogenesis under conditions of capitalist extraction and the rise of the modern nation-state: in particular, *how the hardening of social identities into racial types established forms of structural violence (and modes of resistance) that long pre-date the Industrial Revolution and remain with us in the here-and-now: ..
..this single example is instructive nonetheless. Merdeka can be traced back to Wajo’—a confederation of seafaring societies on the South Sulawesi peninsula—and in fact seems to correspond quite neatly to our formulation of the three freedoms in DOE:
According to the [Sanskrit] chronicles, one of the founding fathers of the Wajo’ had announced “the people of Wajo’ are free; **free from birth.” The Wajo’ were also quite clear on what they meant by this. To secure freedom, their chronicles note, three things are crucial: “firstly not to interfere with people’s wishes; secondly not to forbid the expression of opinions; thirdly not to prevent [people going] to the south, the north, the west, the east, upstream or downstream.
*always here (and we will always be in sea world).. as long as we have any form of m\a\p
**but not legit free if still in sea world.. none of us are free ness.. berners-lee everyone law et al
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen
2\ if we create a way to ground the chaos of 8b legit free people
Could this be a straw in the wind, pointing the way to entirely new (material) histories of human freedom, still to be written?
only if we let go enough.. ie: hari rat park law and pearson unconditional law.. et al..
David Wengrow UCL Institute of Archaeology London (December, 2023)
Acknowledgments: I am grateful to Ayça Çubukçu, Anselm Franke, and Stephen Shennan for their constructive thoughts on this piece, and to Enzo Rossi for organising the critical exchange.
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be you. 